bruxelles

Born in 1965 in Wervik, Belgium
Lives and works between Ghent, Belgium and Brighton, United Kingdom

Wim Delvoye appropriates and diverts art-historical styles and motifs to sublimate trivial yet rather unconventional objects, or sometimes even living subjects. Perhaps best known for naturalizing tattooed pigs in China, or mechanically replicating the digestive system to produce real feces within exhibition spaces, his very eclectic and subversive practice spans a wide range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture and installation. Constantly oscillating between antagonistic realms such as the sacred and the profane, or the local and the global, he sarcastically confronts the various myths that feed our contemporary society from religion to science, and capitalism via unexpected hybridization. Whether he twists the inkblots of Rorschach psychological tests into sleek bronze idols, or cement trucks into laser-cut steel neo-gothic cathedrals, most of his works implement expert craftsmanship along with high technology. Wim Delvoye’s ever-shifting, conceptual-adjacent aesthetics further questions the commodification of art by strategically and provocatively escaping any attempt at definitive categorization or labeling.

Nicolas Bourriaud: Ever since 1988 when I first encountered your work, you’ve constantly been using the aesthetic surroundings of your native town of Ghent and of Flanders, and expanding them to a planetary scale. You explore a kind of mental realm, a deposit of shapes and forms. In this way, you draw on the work of David Hammons…

Wim Delvoye: It’s true. I’ve always liked the way Hammons formulates universal issues based on a local language. You don’t have to be black to experience his work; it speaks directly to you. His work has remained top ranked for nearly thirty years. Picasso too always remained Spanish. My alphabet refers to this realm; but my language is global, universal. Yet 70 per cent of my work could not be done in the United States. The country is far too puritanical.

NB: There are two types of demands in terms of identity behind your work—the European identity in contrast to Anglo-Saxons, on the one hand; and your masculine identity as a reflection of feminism, on the other.

WD: I’m a boy and I’m not ashamed of what I’m made up of: science, trucks, cars, models, and to a certain extent my aggressive side. And I never use the female body. Except in stained glass windows. Most of the time, however, I explore scatology: the colon and the stomach. Sexuality interests me less than digestion does as a subject and as a metaphor. I’m more interested in themes that unify. In the 1990s, women artists began focusing their work on a new subject: their sexuality. This quasi-institutionalized separatism of the 1990s shocks me. It’s politically correct: all of a sudden, during the post-cold war period, people could no longer hide behind the flag. The United States of Mickey Mouse was over. Everyone had to invent an identity for themselves. There were so many good social projects camouflaging a kind of visual poverty…Art is not by definition morally good. I’ve never believed in justifying one’s good heart or intelligence through art.

NB: How is it important to show this negativity in art, this bad disposition? How does this inspire your work?

WD: It’s a more efficient way to criticize the world. At first glance, people will think that I’m not politically correct, but at the same time, my work is as critical as Hans Haacke’s work. But I’m the one who, like Jesus, kisses Judas. I embrace the negative. Observers notice my contradictions by themselves at times: I’m a vegetarian, yet I have a pig farm.

NB: You put forth the figure of an artist capable of inventing an entire economics system, of being totally self sufficient. What does this entrepreneurial side signify for you?

WD: I hire craftsmen, ceramists, glaziers, and batallions of lawyers whenever I print convertible bonds. I see this as a criticism of art-as-investment-product. It’s not easy for artists to produce monetary shares, you have to negotiate. I didn’t think it was possible at first, and that itself was incentive. It’s difficult to invent a machine that produces excrement in a museum (“Cloaca”), and the idea was launched by the same kind of desire to go further. Is it art? In Flemish, when people say, “It’s not an art,” that means that it’s not difficult to do. The yellow pages are my studio. I read: carpenter, lawyer, ceramist…I make a phone call. Sometimes I go to a workshop and I don’t have any idea. I just go because it seems interesting. I speak with the boss for half an hour, but I ask him questions about his machines. How does it work ? With a laser, with water? How do they drill?

NB: I’ve always been interested in the relational aspect of your work. You actually go out and meet people when you’re producing…

WD: I learned French while I was putting together my “la Vache qui rit” collection for “On the Origin of Species.” Each work serves a purpose by showing me something: for example, I could be a radiologist without having to study to the age of 29. I currently have an X-ray machine and I can make diagnoses. “Cloaca” was the high point of this procedure. Each of my pieces demonstrates that being an artist represents a choice.

NB: If we had to describe Wim Delvoye’s visual landscape, there would be two pivotal axes: one is the world of the frieze—decorative, the elegance of arabesques; the other is excrement. I see all of your work revolving around these two extremes, the decorative and the excremential. You either juxtapose these absolute opposites—the organic and the decorative—or you keep them apart.

WD: Artists make art and birds sing. I see only one undertaking in the social and sexual struggle: to seduce and to set yourself apart from the others. This could be a primitive with feathers on his head, or a peacock fanning its tail. But everything good in art is “useless.” You have to accept being rational. Look at the wide variety of colors in nature, all those birds singing for nothing…The females who go and select a mate who sings best make up a Jury of Waste. We are the result of millions and millions of seductive acts that were successful genetically. And everything is wasted. The ornament to an extent is a form of waste. Shit is too, for everyone. This is the most cosmopolitan image in existence, more universal than Jesus or Coca-Cola.